Maxima is a descendant of DOE Macsyma, which had its origins in the late
1960s at MIT. It is the only system based on that effort still publicly
available and with an active user community, thanks to its open source
nature. Macsyma was the first of a new breed of computer algebra
systems, leading the way for programs such as Maple and Mathematica.
Maxima itself is reasonably feature complete at this stage, with
abilities such as symbolic integration, 3D plotting, and an ODE solver,
but there is a lot of work yet to be done in terms of bug fixing,
cleanup, and documentation.
